"This game could have been better."

Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia is the first Gust game that I've played. I bought it based on the box artwork and introduction and knew absolutely nothing about it. It was one of those rare 'buy first, think later' incidents.

Story: 5/10

The game started out with a surprise attack by a group of never seen before viruses, and the start of Lyner's journey to search for a crystal which can defeat them. They are basically two types of races in the game, humans and revayteils. Therefore, the story will revolve around the relationship and connection between the two. Sadly, as the game continues to progress, things become the same old theme of destroying the humans and creating a world just for revayteils. You won't enjoy much of the plot twists(that is if they are any), you will probably be playing the game just for the sake of completing it.

Gameplay: 7/10

The battles of Melody of Elemia can be somewhat of a mixed bag of old and new rpg features. You get to use 4 characters in battle, with 3 on the front line and one reyvateil at the back. The front line characters only have a HP bar whereas a reyvateil has a HP and MP bar. For the front line characters, you attack enemies as you would do normally for a turn-based rpg battle, but for the reyvateil, she can only sing songs to serve as a support character. The longer the reyvateil sings a song, the higher the burst level of the song becomes, and thus more effective. The one good thing is that you have full control of the reyvateil, as you can intercept at any moment of the battle(besides when it's the enemy's move) to cast, stop or change her songs. This makes battles somewhat of a breeze to go through but enjoyable nevertheless.

You can learn Grathmelding to use various crystals and parts to create items and weapons and equipments for your characters, some of which are necessary for advancement into the plot, while many others are just optional but all with a success rate of 100%. The names of Grathmelding items can be changed if you create them with a different reyvateil, but that is just for adding in the optional fun factor. The Equipment for character includes weapon, armor as well as an accessory. Depending on which type of equipment, you can have from 1 up to 4 slots to enhance a character's stats using various matching levels of Grathnode crystals.

Diving is a rather interesting feature, as Lyner can dive into a reyvateil's cosmosphere, in other words, her inner world to craft new and more powerful songs. To do so, you need to gather talk topics and diving points. Talk topics can be found in towns as well as when the story progresses and diving points can be obtained from battles so long as a reyvateil is in your party. The cosmosphere system is sorta fun to go through at first, but the more you do it, it just gets kinda boring and many of the events are pretty lame to say the least.

There is no overworld exploration, meaning you just need to move the cursor to go from one town/dungeon to the next. The same thing works for various places in towns. Dungeons exploration is more traditional with normal encounters and a useful map to check for position. Encounters are based on an encounter bar consisting of blocks. As the bar turns from blue to green to yellow and finally to red, it indicates an encounter battle is coming soon. This pretty much prevents any unexpected encounter so you can plan ahead. This is an added bonus as escape from battles almost always works. After each battle, the color bar will be reduced by half or one or even an unseen one quarter block depending on how long and difficult the dungeon is. Once the color bar is completely gone, there will be no more encounters.

Graphics: 6/10

The game animations, cutscenes and character artwork are good for a PS2, but the the background of towns, dungeons as well as character and enemy models in battles can appear undefined, lacks detail and patchy.

Music: 8/10

The music from this game can be memorable depending on what your tastes are. Some of the tunes may sound recycled. There are also various vocal songs, and they are nice to hum along with. Don't expect too much from the music section, but you won't be too disappointed either.

Replay: 8/10

The game is separated into 3 phases, but it is possible to get an early ending at phase 2. There is quite an amount of endings to the game, but most doesn't require you to replay the game right from the start. Therefore, it is easier and more probable to replay the game starting from various points to get all of the endings. It also takes much effort to acquire stuff like all optional Grathmelding items, cards and talk topics. Therefore, the replay value of this game can be high, especially since it's a rather easy game.

Overall: 7/10

Pros: Pretty fun battle system, interesting cosmosphere feature, easy and enjoyable to play through and replay, added comedy

Cons: Lots of unnecessary detours, misleading translation, little character development, pale storyline, battles can get repetitive(as with most rpgs though)

Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia may have clocked to be a shorter RPG compared to many others, but it certainly doesn't feel so. The game difficulty gets complained to be too easy, but I think that's part of this game's charm. There are much variations and flexibility in the stuff you can do in the game and I enjoy most of them. It is worth a buy, but if you are concerned about the innuendos in the game which I feel is really something made out of nothing by some people who think too much, you can always go for a rent.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/11/07